Early American studies scholar and feminist literary critic, Annette Kolodny, offers three projects that she would take on if she were not now retiring from the profession. These three projects include a feminist analysis of women's interactions on the earliest contact and frontier landscapes; the development of a cross- and inter-disciplinary language for better describing initial interactions between Europeans and Indigenous peoples in the Americas, a language that acknowledges and radically revises our notions of so-called "prehistoric" contacts; and, finally, an analysis of the belief structures that predispose any societal group to enact encounters with Otherness as either welcome, threatening, or something entirely different.